Out to Lunch

In Mike Tyson’s Hurt Locker

Mike Tyson was staying at a hotel in New York’s financial district during a visit to town, and as he strolled into the Palm steak house, I watched one diner glance up at him and freeze, as if he’d just seen a terrifying ghost. But then, others looked thrilled to see the “baddest man on the planet,” and excitedly took cell-phone pictures of him. “I can’t believe it’s you!” one fan cried—nor, in a sense, could Mike Tyson.

A friendly waitress came over to our booth as he scanned the menu. Alas, there was nothing on it that he could eat. I had mistakenly assumed that all boxers eat steaks as big as a table. Several months ago, however, Mr. Tyson became a vegan (and a teetotaler). As a result he looks supremely fit.

He made no fuss. “If you have tomato-basil soup, I love that,” he said unassumingly to the waitress, who assured him the chef would be glad to make it for him. “Perhaps I’ll have it with some rice. Thank you kindly, ma’am.”

He went on to explain in his quiet way, “I used to be extremely carnivorous. But I needed to change my life completely. In order to do that, I have to be in the best physical and emotional state possible. I would call it a paradigm shift in my life. Because I was going to kill myself, or kill some people.”

And so Mike Tyson proved to be as open about himself as an unhealed wound, and, perhaps most surprising of all, the gentlest of damaged souls.

At a crossroads in his turbulent life, the former heavyweight champion of the world—whose epic rise and fall have branded him an American icon—had that morning visited the mean streets of his childhood ghetto, in Brownsville, Brooklyn.

“And the neighborhood is now middle-class!” he recalled in disbelief. “It’s clean and beautiful now. There are gardens in Brownsville! I saw a white woman coming out of the building I lived in, and she looked happy, and it blew my mind. I’m used to seeing thugs and gangsters and guns. And I am saying to myself, Did I just see my past wiped out from me? But I know it can’t be a lie because this is the spray paint on the wall I made when I was 10 years old. I didn’t know how to take it. I embrace who I am, but I thought, I don’t even know who this Mike Tyson guy is anymore.”

“What did your father do for a living?,” I asked him.

“He was a pimp.”

“And your mother?”

“She was with him, you know. And his other women.”

Mr. Tyson is 43 now. Did he think he would live to be 40? “No, not at all. I wasn’t living the life that required that I would live that long.”

His third wife, Kiki, a lovely woman, joined us unexpectedly. “Just pretend I’m not here,” she said breezily.

“How can we do that?,” I asked, to her husband’s amusement.

“It’s real easy. He does it all the time,” she replied, and they both laughed.

They have a little girl together, and there are five other children from different relationships of his. (His four-year-old daughter died tragically in a terrible, freak accident a year ago.) The estimated $300 million he earned in the ring is gone, and with it the spoils of war—the mansions, the jewels and furs, the wild parties and the freeloading entourage. He revealed no bitterness—suggesting the money was his to lose. “When I was a kid I told Cus I wanted to be rich, and he said, ‘That will happen, but that’s not the hardest thing in the world.’ The hardest thing is when your mother is walking the street late at night, and nobody touches her. Because you’re a special person.”

Cus D’Amato is the boxing trainer who famously offered shelter to Mr. Tyson when he was a criminal teenager just out of reform school. They loved each other. “He didn’t care about the money. It was all about the boxing. You could say to him, ‘The president is in town.’ And Cus would say, ‘Well, who did he fight?’ ”

I mentioned that some intellectualize boxing as “the sweet science,” while he called it “the hurt game.” Which is true?

His answer was both. “The science of boxing is magnificent,” he explained. “The art is great. But when that art is projected onto another human being, the first punch that lands makes it ugly—really ugly.”

“Would you make a fist for me?,” I requested.

He obliged, clenching a fist as if poised to knock me through the wall. “Don’t hit me!,” I added quickly, and he laughed reassuringly as I compared my soft, lily-white fist with his. “I’m going to tell you something and you’re going to laugh,” he said. “I have the smallest hands in the history of heavyweight boxing.”

“But yours are lethal, whereas mine have no power.”

“And this is what you don’t understand. Fighting is not physical. The power and pain and hurt don’t come from muscles. Fighting is all about the spirit. The one who fights with brute strength alone is going to lose.”

“Iron Mike” has been busy of late. There was his recent cameo and good-natured self-parody in The Hangover, and the acclaimed James Toback documentary about him, Tyson (which he co-produced). He was in New York filming an upcoming reality-TV show for Animal Planet about the mysterious rooftop world of competitive pigeon fanciers who race their birds for hundreds of miles. It seems a long, long way from the man we thought we knew.

He had first cared for homing pigeons on the roof of an abandoned building when he was a kid, and today he keeps some 800 birds in coops in Brooklyn and Jersey City. “I’m pretty much a neophyte at racing them. But I do love them, and I understand the dynamics of racing, so I should be able to do it.”

Why, I asked, do they always return home? “No one truly knows. And a bird might not make it home. You wait and wait, and don’t know if a bird of prey got him, or he hit a wall, or followed another bird into a coop. But many times when they do come home I would like to believe it’s because the bird loves me. I think everyone believes that. Because my food tastes better, and my coop is cleaner, than the rest. Because I love the birds more than the others do, and I know how to talk to them. And that’s what I really believe.”